“It is our last chance, sweetheart,” I said very slowly, “and we dare not neglect it, but I will make a promise. If I feel my strength failing, when I know I can do no more, I will come back to you. Standing here you could reach my hand as the eddying current sweeps me round. Now, wish me good fortune, darling.”
Grace stooped and kissed my forehead, for even as I spoke I knelt to strip off the long boots. This was no time for useless ceremony. Then with a faint ghost of a blush she added, “You must not be handicapped—fling away your jacket and whatever would hamper you,” after which, standing beside me at the edge of the water, she said very solemnly, “God bless and keep you, Ralph.”
Then I whirled both hands above my head, leaped out from the quartz shelf, and felt the chilly flood part before me until, instead of dull green transparency, there was daylight about me again, and my left hand swept forward through the air with the side-stroke which in younger days I had taken much pains to cultivate. Now there was the hardness in muscles which comes from constant toil behind it, besides a force which I think was not born altogether of bodily strength, and even then I could almost rejoice to feel the water sweep past me a clear half-fathom as the palm drove backward hollowed to the hip, while the river boiled and bubbled under my partly submerged head. But I swung right around the eddy, and almost under the tail rush of the fall, while once for a moment I caught sight of Grace’s 182 intent face as, husbanding my strength for a few seconds, I passed tossed about on the confused welter close by the quartz shelf. Then, as the circling waters hurried me a second time round and outward toward the further shore, I made what I knew must be the last effort, made it with cracking sinews and bursting lungs, and drew clear by a foot or two of the eddy’s circumference. A few more strokes and an easy paddling carried me down-stream, and a wild cry of triumph, which more resembled a hoarse cackle than a shout, went up when at last I drew myself out of the water beside the canoe.
I lay on the cold stone breathing hard for several minutes; then I managed to drag the light shell out and empty her, after which I tore up a strip of the cedar flooring to form a paddle, and found that though one side was crushed the damage was mostly above flotation level. It would serve no purpose to narrate the return passage, and it was sufficiently arduous, but a man in the poorest craft with a paddle has four times the power of any swimmer, and at last I reached the shingle, which was almost covered now. Grace stood on the brink to meet me with a cry of heartfelt relief when I ran in the bows, then a momentary dizziness came upon me, as, all dripping as I was, I lifted her into the stern. After I thrust off the craft, and, struggling clear of the eddy, we shot away on the outgoing stream, she smiled as she said:
“It was splendidly done! Ralph, is it foolish—I once supposed it would be so—that because you have the strength to do these things you make me proud of you?”
There is little more to tell, and that passage through the cañon left behind it an unpleasant memory. Though it was rising all the time, the stream ran more evenly, there were no more cataracts or whirlpools, and while Grace was obliged to bail hard with—so closely does burlesque 183 follow on tragedy—one of my long boots, she could keep the leaks under. I did my best with the paddle, for I could see the tension was telling on her, and at last the great rock walls fell back on either hand, and dwarf pines and juniper climbed the less precipitous slopes, until these too opened out into a wide valley, and we slid forth safely into clear sunlight. Never had brightness and warmth so rejoiced me as they did after the cold damp horror of that passage through the dark rift in the earth.